Five Spice Street tells the story of a street in an unnamed city whose inhabitants speculate on the life of a mysterious Madam X. The novel interweaves their endless suppositions into a work that is at once political parable and surreal fantasia. Some think X is 50 years old; others that she is 22. Some believe she has occult powers and has thereby enslaved the young men of the street; others think she is a clever trickster playing mind gam...

A profound, poignant story of a village healer and her community, from one of the world’s great contemporary novelists“A complex and illuminating portrait of a group of healers in China . . . [that] offers profound insights about what it means to pursue and live a fulfilling life.”—Publishers Weekly“A barefoot doctor herself, [Can Xue] has a unique and powerful way of transporting readers to new worlds where reality and mag...

Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book AwardIn Mother River, Can Xue, one of China’s most daring and visionary writers, invites us into a surreal landscape where reality is as fluid as a river itself. This collection of thirteen stories weaves together vivid, dreamlike narratives that challenge our perceptions of time, identity, and existence.Through her signature blend of the absurd and the profound, Can Xue explores the fragile boundaries betwen ...

A surreal, fantastic coming-of-age novel blending Eastern and Western beliefs, from the winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award.

A major new collection of stories by one of the most exciting and creative voices in contemporary Chinese literatureCan Xue’s stories observe no obvious conventions of plot or characterization. That is the only rule they follow. Instead, they tend to limn a disordered and poetic state given structure by philosophical wonder and emotional rigor.Combining elements of both Chinese materiality—the love of physical things—and Western abstract thinking, Can Xue i...

Thirteen dreamy stories from one of China's most innovative writers.

"There's a new world master among us, and her name is Can Xue." —Robert CooverTwo young girls sneak onto the grounds of a hospital, where they find a disturbing moment of silence in a rose garden. A couple grows a plant that blooms underground, invisibly, to their long-time neighbor's consternation. A cat worries about its sleepwalking owner, who receives a mysterious visitor while he's asleep. After a ten-year absence, a young man visits his uncle, on the twenty-fourth floor of a ...

Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book AwardIn Mother River, Can Xue, one of China's most daring and visionary writers, invites us into a surreal landscape where reality is as fluid as a river itself. This collection of thirteen stories weaves together vivid, dreamlike narratives that challenge our perceptions of time, identity, and existence.Through her signature blend of the absurd and the profound, Can Xue explores the fragile boundaries betwee...

Red Peonies: Two Novellas of China is the first translation in English of two of the books written by Zhang Yihe about women she met and befriended in prison. The subjects of her stories have been described as “beautiful women who wielded magic power over men. They were like jealous evil spirits, vengeful treacherous persons—countless snakes coiled around other people.”Zhang Yihe was fifteen in 1957, the year her father was declared an enemy of the People’s Republic of Chi...

New Novel from the Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book AwardFrontier opens with the story of Liujin, a young woman heading out on her own to create her own life in Pebble Town, a somewhat surreal place at the base of Snow Mountain where wolves roam the streets and certain enlightened individuals can see and enter a paradisaical garden.Exploring life in this city (or in the frontier) through the viewpoint of a dozen different characters, some si...

This book comprehensively introduces innovative technologies for practical applications in apple production, which include, but not limited to autonomous thinning, Internet of Things, drones for pollination, disease detection and control, and growth stage detection. Conventional apple production is a labor-intensive industry, and many operations require labor, such as thinning, pollination, and harvest. Increasing labor cost and shrinking labor pool negatively affect the sustainability of ...